Mapping Wikipedia
Comments(12) I was reading reddit the other day and stumbled upon the fact that wikipedia has an API. Neat I thought, and having some free time since my exams are now over I figured I would play around a bit with it. When I browse wikipedia I often click from link to link, and have come to the conclusion that all articles are 6 degrees of separation. For example I can go from Ubuntu to Tesco to Japan to G8 to United States to George W. Bush bet you never knew Ubuntu was connected to George W. Bush. I once wrote a map of the internet program that people seemed to like to download and modify so in that spirit I wrote wikimap.py to map wikipedia. wikimap.py Requires pygraphviz (Install using sudo aptitude install python-pygraphviz). To use the program simply run the program and give it the wiki page name for example “python wikimap.py Norman_Graham” Note that Ubuntu is Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution) and you can find the full name in the address bar of your browser. For more complicated maps use wikimap.py –help for full usage info.
Here are a few examples that I created with wikimap.py
And a really large one being viewed in inkscape.
More examples including the dot files can be found at http://www.files.earobinson.org/wiki/. But there are a few features I would like to add:
- Generating the graph using python-pygraphviz currently takes a really long time and I would like to be able to do it faster
- Page links currently include templates, I would like to only use links in the body of the text
- It would be nice if the software cached previously seen connections. (But then I need to detect updates to that page)
If anyone has a nice simple soultion to any of those problems leave a comment. Also if you are able to generate any neat images I would love to see them.